Rebuilding, the Bush way

I don't think Anne Kornblut intended to be snarky, but, man, this says it all about Bush's approach to rebuilding the Gulf.

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 10 - Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated this city, President Bush flew in on Monday night with a newly upbeat focus on progress that has been made, staying overnight at the luxury Windsor Court Hotel and meeting with local officials over dinner in the French Quarter.

With long-term temporary housing still an acute problem for thousands of hurricane victims, Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, planned to visit a Habitat for Humanity home-building site early Tuesday for an interview on the "Today" show on NBC. From there, they were to travel to Pass Christian, a gutted coastal town across the border in Mississippi, for the reopening of an elementary school.

"The president pledged that he would be a partner as the Gulf Coast region recovered and rebuilds itself," a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said in explaining the purpose of the trip. [emphasis added for Extra Snark Action!]

Preznit stays in a luxury hotel, relies on charities to come to the relief of the Gulf states' homeless, and gets back to being on "making progress" message points in photo/TV ops. In this, as in so many things, he merely reflects the Republican way of governing.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 - As Hurricane Katrina put the issue of poverty onto the national agenda, many liberal advocates wondered whether the floods offered a glimmer of opportunity. The issues they most cared about - health care, housing, jobs, race - were suddenly staples of the news, with President Bush pledged to "bold action."

But what looked like a chance to talk up new programs is fast becoming a scramble to save the old ones.

Conservatives have already used the storm for causes of their own, like suspending requirements that federal contractors have affirmative action plans and pay locally prevailing wages. And with federal costs for rebuilding the Gulf Coast estimated at up to $200 billion, Congressional Republican leaders are pushing for spending cuts, with programs like Medicaid and food stamps especially vulnerable.

"We've had a stunning reversal in just a few weeks," said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. "We've gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn't actually happening."

Mr. Greenstein's comments were echoed by Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut: "Poor people are going to get the short end of the stick, despite all the public sympathy. That's a great irony."

The Republicans argument: why continue with those old-economy ideas to battle poverty and a healthcare crisis, when we have all these shiny new experimental ideas from our sundry think tanks?

But many conservatives see logic, not irony, at work. If the storm exposed great poverty, they say, it also exposed the problems of the very policies that liberals have supported.

"This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway," said Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group influential on Capitol Hill.

It takes a certain kind of bastard to say that the food stamps program -- among many other assistance programs -- is failing.

I guess after a fine meal in the French Quarter, Bush and his cronies have forgotten those searing images of...whaddya call em?...oh, yeah, the poor.

In another dispute, the president has taken on a senior member of his own party, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Mr. Grassley wants to expand Medicaid to cover all the poor who survived Hurricane Katrina, including many adults who did not previously qualify. The expansion would last five months, though it could be extended, and the federal government would cover the costs.

While most Democrats support the measure, the Bush administration strongly opposes it, arguing that evacuees would be served faster through more modest changes in existing state programs.

In part, the dispute has the feel of a proxy war about the larger fate of the program, which the administration has sharply criticized.

A similar proxy war has played out in housing policy after the Senate voted to house evacuees through the Section 8 program, which offers poor people subsidies for private housing. Critical of the program's cost, the administration instead created a parallel voucher program for hurricane evacuees.

In budget battles, the storm had one immediate effect: delaying the $35 billion in spending cuts ordered in last spring's Congressional budget resolution. About $10 billion over five years was expected to come from Medicaid and about $600 million from food stamps.

Delayed for how long? At a time when more families have fallen below the poverty line, when all the gains the working poor made during the Clinton administration have disappeared, when we are spending upwards of $200 billion to bring the shining beacon of civil war to the Middle East, the first thing these corporate fluffers want to do is cut Medicaid and food stamps.

I know these ain't as powerful as opposition to gay marriage and a commitment to life beginning with the first hint of seepage, but there are other "moral values."

What Wilson needs is chemotherapy, and that is something the government seems unable to help him with. Wilson was being treated with monthly chemo injections for his intestinal cancer before the hurricane.

....Under the present rules for Katrina victims, if you are destitute, the government will pay your medical bills. Ditto if you are severely disabled or have children. But if you're an adult who had a job that included health benefits and you lost that job because of the storm, the government can't seem to help.

Ah, but rolling out, and even expanding the old ideas -- like, ya know, chemo therapy -- would be foolish when we now have a chance to try new ideas, like, um, um...